4 Reasons to Improve Communication Skills and Build Trust.

Communication is the natural skill of explaining what’s going on in our hearts and minds. Many of us say things we don’t mean more often than things we mean. That’s because we’re sensitive and our communication skills haven’t developed fully.

If you are willing to reboot your relationships and acquire more efficient communication skills, this is the guide for you. Communicate with love, and always protect your connections.

1. An influential person has excellent communication skills.

Even Jesus said that the mouth speaks from the heart. Therefore, what we keep in our hearts, we expose through communication.

If we have fear in our heart, it’s easy for people to notice that. Our emotions show in our body language, words, tone, and even facial expressions.

2. How we appear, speak, and present ourselves to others is very different if we feel confident and proud.

The thing is, when we are scared or confused, we communicate in a way that lets us try to hide what we’re feeling. We act happy, pretend that nothing is wrong, and hold ourselves back. And for what? To avoid actual reality and keep our ideas all to ourselves?

There are many people out there who have never learned how to express their feelings and emotions correctly through words. This results in a fake reality for them, because it has never been validated. These people hide for a lifetime. They hide behind their social mask and never really reveal who they are.

3. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

When we are afraid of exposing ourselves and our true feelings, we end up falsely communicating.

To stop hiding the truth, we need to realize these things:

1. We should value and understand what is going on and what others are feeling.

2. We should get to know ourselves and recognize who we are. Only then can we get to know other people and understand them and their perspective.

After we realize these things, figure out what is going on inside us, and get to know ourselves, our communication skills can improve to their optimum.

We can be honest with others only if we are honest with ourselves.

We can understand and communicate with others only if we understand ourselves.

Once we’ve accomplished those things, we are powerful people. Let’s become powerful people!

4. Let’s be honest and genuine with ourselves and our feelings.

If we never learn how to value ourselves, we will waste life on fake communication and misunderstandings. And we sure don’t want that! Let’s focus on improving our communication skills.

Furthermore, not valuing ourselves causes us to passively communicate with others. We’ll talk behind a fear of truth, and continue feeling powerless. Even worse, we may start aggressively communicating. We sure don’t want others to see us as such a person. Do we want people to form their opinion of us based on that false image? Let’s be true to ourselves and to others.

Passive Communicators.

The problem with passive communicators is that they can convince others that everyone else is more important than they are. They believe that they don’t matter and everyone else does. They seem to care not about themselves but only about others.

For example, when passive people are in a relationship, they believe their partner’s feelings and needs are more important than theirs. They never get angry or offended. They just get through it and move on like nothing happened. Passive people have few communication skills and are always OK with everything. They don’t have opinions and always let others make the choices, seemingly fine with everything.

But the real problem is that passive communicators don’t even notice this problem! They don’t believe they are passive. They think of themselves as nice, calm people who never cause problems and are patient. It’s OK not to have requirements, needs, or wishes, they think. And how can they fix the problem when they don’t even see it?

Some communications experts would say these passive communicators are lying, both to others and to themselves.

Passive communicators lie because they are afraid of people’s reactions to finding out that they also have needs and wishes. They hide their feelings to avoid appearing selfish. People might even see them as evil, they imagine. That’s why they hide and lie in any relationship.

At the end of the day, being passive is exhausting, so it’s hard to maintain long-term. With time, even passive people get overloaded and take action. They finally do something to meet their needs and stop being passive.

It often turns out that these passive people are actually selfish. They were aware that they were lying to others about their situation and feelings. They were mainly worried about themselves and their own feelings.

Here’s a typical example:

There are two sisters, and one lends some money to the other. Days go by, then weeks, months, and years, with the money neither being mentioned nor paid back. The one who lent the money is a passive communicator. And of course, she never asked her sister for her money back and never confronted her about it. She didn’t want to cause problems, and she maintained peace. After all, she didn’t need the money, so she didn’t feel she should create a problem.

After 10 years, she still didn’t have her money back. So then she decided to sue her sister for the money. She did get her money back, but she damaged her relationship with her sister. Was it worth it?

Aggressive communicators.

Aggressive communicators, on the other hand, think they’re the only ones who matter, not the rest of us.

These aggressive communicators always get what they want. And they see this as no problem and think they have fantastic communication skills based on always being the loudest one in the room.

These people are the complete opposite of passive communicators. They are always the first at anything, and the passive ones are last. But the most incredible thing is that the aggressive ones end up in relationships with the passive ones! Yes, it’s true!

It’s not that hard to believe, though. The aggressive ones are always first because they think they matter more, and the passive ones are okay with that because they don’t want to question it. It’s an ideal pairing.

But it’s not as simple as it sounds. They don’t think about it on the same level or have equal value. They can’t balance it out, which causes lots of anxiety. And that sure eliminates intimacy!

There’s one aspect where they’re the same, though: both of these groups of people are powerful, because selfishness and fear motivate them.

Passive-aggressive communicators.

There is another group of people whose communication skills combine those of the previous two types. It’s the most sophisticated style and is called passive-aggressive. It’s like the worst kind of passive and the worst kind of aggressive.

These people believe that others matter, but not really. They like to control people, so they’re manipulators. They may seem to like us, even support and agree with us. But later we find out that, after just a little disagreement, they punish us. They withhold their love, are very judgmental in their advice, and are sarcastic in the extreme.

Being in a relationship with such a person is tough. But people outside the relationship often can’t see that. They don’t take seriously the partner of a passive-aggressive person who asks for advice or counsel about dealing with the manipulation, because they can’t see the hidden manipulative side.

What’s even more interesting is that everyone else sees the manipulator as very kind, smart, polite, and always smiling. How would they know that the very second they leave the room, this person criticizes and accuses?

An excellent description of such a person is a dragon covered with chocolate. Good metaphor, right?

To develop excellent communication skills, we need to believe that everyone matters, including ourselves.

Being powerful and honest establishes a communication style of assertiveness. That’s the ultimate goal. And we all need to achieve it. We need to honestly feel deep down in ourselves that people and their feelings matter. We also need to feel that we ourselves, and our opinions, matter.

Assertive communicators sometimes insist on no communication. When people insist that their own values, or wrong values, be adopted, assertive communicators simply say no. They want neither relationships nor conversations with such people.

Assertive communicators aren’t afraid to expose their feelings to other people, since they value themselves and are not scared to be true to others. They try to find the words to express themselves properly. That’s an essential communication skill.

The process of communicating helps these people hear what others think of them. It is the core of honor, the heart of respect.

Interacting with people is so much easier with this skill.

These are powerful communicators who aren’t afraid to show it. They also want others to feel proud, appreciate it when they do, and even enjoy others knowing that!

Furthermore, they often confront problem communicators such as the three types above. Direct in their approach to them, they ask passive communicators what they’re willing to do about problems, they politely avoid conversations with aggressive people by telling them to come back when they can be respectful, and when interacting with passive-aggressive people, they get to the point and tell them to be responsible and talk only if they’re willing to speak frankly and truly.

They maintain their boundaries and only talk with people who are honest, respectful, and equally participate in the communication.

It’s as simple as that.

The differences in these many types of communication skills are clear. Let’s choose wisely which type we use!

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1 Comment

Excellent tips on communication! I think 3 is the biggest one, people seem to want to appear something they are not and soon or later that facade will fall and they true them will be out there and then they are back tracking. When we have a professional communication skill and are straight forward clients will be attracted to you. Great nuggets!